Archive for the 'Women's Issues' Category

The young Indian woman of the 21st century is more empowered than ever before. And L’Oreal, the Body Shop, Garnier, Ponds, and Jolen are helping them charge ahead even more, all through the magic of skin-lightening creams.

We’ve all heard about Unilever’s Fair & Lovely whitening cream. It promises to take a young woman from paper-bag brown to oatmeal-colored beige, ensuring her career success and a handsome husband. Now the aforementioned cosmetics and skin-care companies are expanding into India by offering their own skin-lightening products.

Being an independent woman is about having choice and control over your life, and these lightening products seem to offer it in the form of choice and control over skin color. Advertisements also carry a “grrrl power” message. Fair & Lovely’s ads traditionally focused on how a dark-skinned woman could find romance by using the cream. Now the focus of the ads has shifted: The product can help a swarthy woman get a traditionally male job, such as cricket match announcer. Talk about being a liberated woman! Who needs a husband when you can be a cricket match announcer?

Yes, there is the controversy about the ideal of light skin, which I blogged about in March with my “Looking Right Is Looking White” post. When it comes to being outraged at the light skin ideal, though, that’s “a very Western Way of looking at the world,” says Ashok Venkatramani of Hindustan Lever, the Indian subsidiary of Unilever. “The definition of beauty in the Western world is linked to anti-aging. In Asia, it’s all about being two shades lighter.”

He has a point. In the United States, we don’t hear about how Botox propagates prejudice against the elderly. For the longest time, we didn’t hear much about how skinny models propagated prejudice against heavy people. Girls just got anorexic instead. White teeth are an ideal. So why not white skin? And if white women can aspire for darker skin by using products such as Coppertone’s sunless tanning lotions, then what’s so wrong with brown women aspiring for lighter skin by using products such as Fair & Lovely? The grass is always greener on the other side.

Of course, as I wrote back in March, Coppertone doesn’t market its product by saying that white women need it to land a good husband or a good job. And in the Western world, being pale doesn’t carry anywhere near the social burden that being dark does in India.

In a capitalist world, businesses provide what consumers want, so there’s no point in getting mad at the companies that produce these skin-lightening products. If you want to change the fair-skinned ideal, you’ve got to change societal attitudes, which of course is no easy task. And Fair & Lovely certainly showed that it can change with the times when it shifted its ads’ focus from success in romance to success in a career.

Ironically, Unilever not only makes Fair & Lovely, but it also makes Dove products and promotes them in the Western world with its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which encourages women to celebrate their curves. So while it tells women in the West to accept their bodies as they are, it tells women in India to, basically, be white. It’s hypocrisy, but it’s also a response to two distinct sets of consumer aspirations.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Ebony magazine, which targets the African-American market, used to carry ads for skin whitening creams. Today, it no longer does. Similarly, fair skin may empower Indian women today. Let’s just hope it’s not needed for empowerment tomorrow.

We’re all aware that in poor developing countries, fewer girls than boys attend school. International development “experts” have analyzed the problem to death and have produced heaps of books and reports that offer all sorts of explanations and solutions for the school-attendance gender gap. (Examples: Girls aren’t in school because the culture is patriarchal. The solution is to offer parents cash or food subsidies to keep their daughters in school.)

Sometimes in life, however, problems aren’t as complex as they might seem. I’ve recently come across two pieces of evidence that suggest that part of the gender gap in school attendance is simply a matter of feminine hygiene — or lack of it. With more maxi-pads and more toilets, more adolescent girls could be back in school.

Piece of Evidence #1 (Source: Thomas Friedman’s April 18, 2007, column)

Naisiae Tobiko, a 28-year-old Kenyan woman, noticed that when she was a child, girls from families poorer than hers often came to school, but as they grew older, they missed four days of school each month. Many even ended up dropping out because of missed school days. She asked them what was going on, and they said they could not attend school when they were menstruating because their families could not afford maxi-pads.

“How can I come to a place when I am bleeding?” asked the girls, some of whom were using rags or mud. 

Today, it’s Tobiko to the rescue. In partnership with the Girl Child Network and other NGOs, she distributes free menstrual products to girls. So far she’s reached 189,000 girls out of a target of 500,000. More maxi-pads equals more educated young women, which equals more informed moms, which equals healthier, happier children in the next generation.

Piece of Evidence #2 (Source: Page 378 of William Easterly’s hardcover book The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good and Nov. 29, 2004’s BusinessWeek article “The eBay Way“)

GlobalGiving is a “matchmaking” organization that pairs development projects with funders. In 2002, some teachers in Coimbatore, India, noticed that many girls were leaving school once they reached puberty. The teachers posted a project on GlobalGiving. The project ad was titled “New Toilet Block for School. $5,000.” Four U.S. donors, including a writer from New York City, funded the project. Three months later, the girls had their own toilet block. It turns out that girls had been dropping out en masse because lack of private toilets made them feel embarrassed when they were menstruating. Two years after the toilet block was constructed, 100 girls had stayed in school. GlobalGiving estimates that by 2012, 440 girls will have stayed through graduation — that’s $11.36 per girl to keep her in school.

Sometimes, it’s the small things that make all the difference.

Many women in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa desire whiter skin because it makes them feel more attractive. To achieve a lighter look, women in these parts of the world have turned to the popular skin-whitening cream Fair & Lovely for many years.

But is white skin something to be promoted? 

Three years ago, in a seminal article in Foreign Policy magazine, called “Selling to the Poor,” C.K. Prahalad, a business professor, and Allen Hammond of the World Resources Institute argued that if businesses targeted underserved poor consumers in developing countries, they could generate profits while improving the welfare of the poor. As an example of success in using this “doing well by doing good” method, they described how an impoverished Indian street sweeper was able to buy Fair & Lovely skin-whitening cream. They wrote that because this poor woman could now purchase “an affordable consumer product formulated for her needs,” she felt “empowered.” 

When I first read about that example, I felt revolted. Prahalad and Hammond thought that a business was empowering women by helping them look more Caucasian?

Once my blood pressure went down though, I had to acknowledge that sadly it’s true: Looking white is looking right.

Every culture has its standard of beauty. In India and much of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, fair skin is the paragon of pulchritude.

In India, TV commercials and magazine ads are full of models with a light complexion referred to as “wheatish.” Their skin tones bear no resemblance to the paper-bag brown and chocolate-colored hues of the vast majority of India’s 1.1 billion people.

The pressure to look fair is especially strong for women. It’s key to snagging a good husband. Most females can tell you the story of some young woman whose parents had a difficult time finding her a husband because she was so dark. Girls get chastised by their parents for playing in the sun because doing so will make them dark and unattractive to a potential groom one day. When young, single women get photographed for “marketing” photos to send off to potential grooms, they make themselves fairer by applying generous amounts of powder to their faces.

If fair skin is so important to looking beautiful and finding a good husband, can anyone blame an impoverished street sweeper for desiring Fair & Lovely? As Prahalad and Hammond argue, the company that sells Fair and Lovely, Hindustan Lever Limited (the Indian subsidiary of Unilever and a company on whose board Prahalad sits), is making a profit while empowering women at the “bottom of the pyramid” to advance socially and economically.

Recently, Aneel Karnani, a business professor at the University of Michigan, sparked a heated debate on Salon.com and the blog of the World Resources Institute (on whose board Prahalad sits and on whose staff Hammond works) with his working paper about whether Fair & Lovely is truly an example of “doing well by doing good.”

The racist prejudices that Fair & Lovely clearly perpetuates and propagates are disturbing. No one knows for sure how white skin came to be the standard of beauty. Some blame it on white European colonizers. Others say that dark skin used to signal that a woman was a poor peasant who labored outdoors while white skin signaled that she was an upper-class lady. Whatever the origins of the fair-skinned ideal, Fair & Lovely clearly sustains it, particularly through its advertising strategy.

Fair & Lovely’s TV advertisements have a typical formula: A sad, dark-skinned young woman can’t find a job or get the attention of a love interest. Then she uses Fair & Lovely, becomes whiter, and suddenly she gets the job or attracts the handsome man. For example, in one controversial Indian TV commercial, a father laments that he doesn’t have a son to provide for him and his dark-skinned daughter doesn’t earn enough. The daughter uses Fair & Lovely, becomes whiter, lands a job as a flight attendant, and makes her father happy.

This commercial generated so much controversy that the Indian government banned it. It also won an award for most gender-insensitive TV advertisement, with the chairwoman of the judging panel stating that Fair & Lovely ads “propagate the myth that a woman has to be beautiful to be successful or find a suitable match.”

But wait a second.

Numerous social science studies have proven that attractive, well-groomed people are more successful. Furthermore, anyone who’s acquainted with the system of arranged marriages in India knows that a fair-skinned woman has a competitive advantage. For better or for worse, the sad but true reality is that whiter skin helps women get ahead in life and feel more confident.

And it’s not only white skin that’s desirable. It’s just about any cosmetic change that could make a woman appear more Caucasian: green contact lenses, hair that’s dyed brown with blond highlights, eyelid surgery for women of East Asian ethnicity, and hair straightening for those of African ethnicity.

Given this reality, Fair & Lovely is “doing good” within the confines of local culture—it is helping individual women live up an ideal, even it’s the deplorable ideal of “looking right by looking white.” The cream is helping women advance in a world where the “rules of the game” are racist and unfair.

But, Fair & Lovely could do even more “good,” by following two suggestions. First, hire some creative minds to figure out how to market the product without propagating the racist idea that a woman needs to be fair skinned to get a job or a husband. Study Coppertone’s marketing strategy. This maker of sunless tanning lotions promotes its products without suggesting that women need darker skin to succeed in life.

Second, do some clinical testing to prove that your product actually works. Unilever has never been required to document that Fair & Lovely actually lightens skin. Furthermore, Karnani cites numerous dermatologists who say that skin-whitening creams such as Fair & Lovely just don’t work. (In fact, it could make people more vulnerable to skin diseases. In the United States, whites have a 10-times greater risk of melanoma than do African Americans.) Like the many unregulated weigh-loss supplements and baldness cures sold in the United States, Fair & Lovely may offer a dream, but deliver nothing. And that would be true exploitation of the poor.

Meanwhile, civil society must continue its efforts to change the “rules of the game”—the ones that elevate the Caucasian look above others. It can’t expect HLL to do so; HLL profits immensely from the status quo so it has no incentive to dismantle the cultural ideal of fair skin. Already, women’s groups in India have been vocal about Fair & Lovely’s ads and gotten some of them pulled. They need to keep up the pressure. Maybe one day they’ll get HLL to wake up and launch something akin to Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty.

Until then, we have to bear with the sad but true reality: look white is looking right. And it’s a dark and ugly truth that Fair & Lovely cream makes whiteness accessible to some of the poorest of the poor. That may be empowering for an India sweeper today, but it will be empowering for her daughter tomorrow? 

This week, I’d like to flag three items of interest to the young professional.

1. The A$$hole Rating Self Exam (ARSE). I rarely ever use foul language, so please forgive me for the title of this self-exam, which answers the question, “Are You a Certified A$$hole?” The 24-question self-exam is the creation of Bob Sutton, a Stanford University professor who is author of the book The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. If you have a colleague who’s difficult to get along with (an a$$hole, in Sutton’s parlance), then this book may be for you. It teaches you how to deal with employees who have toxic personalities. Or if you yourself happen to be the jerk at work (and you can diagnose yourself with the self-exam), this book has plenty of advice to help you self-correct.

2. PowerPoint Contest. There are Web sites for sharing photos. There are also Web sites for sharing music. Then there are Web sites for sharing videos. And I just discovered there is a Web site for sharing all your wonderful, and not-so-wonderful, PowerPoint presentations! (If I’m the last person discover this, please forgive me, yet again.) SlideShare, a presentation-sharing start-up, is hosting the World’s Best Presentation Contest. From now through April 23, you can dust off and upload any PowerPoint presentation of yours (the subject matter is irrelevant) to enter the contest. A panel of top presentation gurus will judge the entries, and winners will receive some cool prizes.

3. BusinessWeek’s sexist body language slideshow. BusinessWeek recently had a pretty decent article about good body language. Most young professionals know good body language is crucial for effective presentations and successful interviews. But then the magazine shot itself in the foot with its accompanying slideshow of body language tips.

On Slide 7 (of 11), the advice reads, “The winning technique: Using complex hand gestures.” Then it has a photo of a man giving the “A-OK” hand signal by making a circle out of his thumb and index finger. In some parts of the world, especially in some South American countries, this sign can be mistaken for an obscene hand gesture. Given that we live in a globalized world, maybe the slideshow should have reminded us about cultural differences in body language.

And then there are slides 10 and 11. A supposedly professional woman is revealing her cleavage by wearing a shirt with a plunging neckline. And this is in a slideshow about body language and non-verbal communication? Thank you, BusinessWeek, for edifying us on what women need to do to be taken seriously.